The other part of the community (but, under such conditions, could one speak of a community?), scattered over the enormous area of the Urubamba and Madre de Dios basins, kept itself jealously isolated, even at the end of the fifties, and resisted any form of contact with the whites. The Dominican missionaries had not reached them, and, for the moment at least, there was nothing in that region to attract the Viracochas. But even this sector was not homogeneous. Among these primitive Machiguengas there was an even more archaic small group or fraction, hostile to the others, known by the name of Kogapakori. Centered on the region bathed by two tributaries of the Urubamba, the Timpía and the Tikompinía, the Kogapakori went about stark-naked, though some of the men wore phallic sheaths made of bamboo, and attacked anyone who entered their territory, even those who were ethnically related. Their case was exceptional, for, compared with other tribes, the Machiguengas were traditionally peaceful. Their gentle and docile nature had made them choice victims of the rubber boom, during the great manhunts to provide Indian labor for the rubber camps, at which time the tribe had been literally decimated and on the point of disappearing. For the same reason they had always come off the losers in skirmishes with their age-old enemies the Yaminahuas and the Mashcos, especially the latter, famous for their bellicosity. These were the Machiguengas the Schneils told us about. For two years and a half they had been working to make themselves accepted by the groups with which they had succeeded in making contact, yet they still encountered distrust and even hostility on their part.
Yarinacocha at dusk, when the red mouth of the sun begins to sink behind the treetops and the greenish lake glows beneath the indigo sky where the first stars are beginning to twinkle, is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. We were sitting on the porch of a wooden house contemplating, over the Schneils’ shoulders, the horizon line of the darkening forest. It was a magnificent sight. But I think we all felt uncomfortable and depressed. For the story they told us — they were young, with that healthy, candid, puritanical, hardworking air about them that all the linguists wore like a uniform — was a dismal one. Even the two anthropologists of the group, Matos Mar and the Mexican, Juan Comas, were surprised at the depths of prostration and pessimism to which, according to the Schneils, the broken-spirited Machiguenga people had been reduced. From what we heard, the tribe seemed to be virtually falling apart.
These Machiguengas had hardly been studied. Except for a slim volume published in 1943 by a Dominican, Father Vicente de Cenitagoya, and a few articles by other missionaries on their customs and their language, which had appeared in the journals of the Order, no serious ethnographic study of them existed. They belonged to the Arawak family and there was some confusion between them and the Campas of the Ene, Perené, and Gran Pajonal Rivers, since their languages had common roots. Their origin was a total mystery; their identity, blurred. Vaguely referred to as Antis by the Incas, who expelled them from the eastern part of the Cusco region but were never able to invade their jungle territory or subjugate them, they appear in the Chronicles and Relations of the Colony under such arbitrarily assigned designations as Manarfes, Opataris, Pilconzones, until nineteenth-century travelers at last started calling them by their name. One of the first to refer to them in this way was a Frenchman, Charles Wiener, who in 1880 came across “two Machiguenga corpses, ritually abandoned in the river,” which he decapitated and added to his collection of curiosities collected in the Peruvian jungle. They had been on the move since time immemorial and it was unlikely that they had ever lived together in settled communities. The fact that they had been displaced at frequent intervals by more warlike tribes and by whites — during the various booms: the rubber, gold, rosewood, and agricultural colonization “fevers”—toward ever more unhealthy and infertile regions, where the survival of a large group was impossible, had accentuated their fragmentation and brought on the development among them of an individualism bordering on anarchy. Not one Machiguenga village existed. They did not have caciques and did not appear to acknowledge any authority other than that of each father in his own family. They lived in tiny units of ten people or so at most, scattered over the enormous region that included all the jungle zone of Cusco and Madre de Dios. The poverty of the area forced these human units to keep continually on the move, maintaining a considerable distance between each other so as not to exhaust the game. Due to the erosion and impoverishment of the soil, they had to shift the location of their cassava patches at the end of every two years of cultivation at most.
What the Schneils had been able to discover of their mythology, beliefs, and customs suggested that they had always led a very hard life and afforded a few glimpses of their history. They had been breathed out by the god Tasurinchi, creator of everything that existed, and did not have personal names. Their names were always temporary, related to a passing phenomenon and subject to change: the one who arrives, or the one who leaves, the husband of the woman who just died, or the one who is climbing out of his canoe, the one just born, or the one who shot the arrow. Their language had expressions only for the quantities one, two, three, and four. All the others were covered by the adjective “many.” Their notion of paradise was modest: a place where the rivers had fish and the woods had game. They associated their nomad life with the movement of the stars through the firmament. There was a high incidence of self-inflicted death among them. The Schneils told us of several cases they had witnessed: Machiguenga men and women — mostly the latter — who took their own lives by plunging chambira thorns into their hearts or into their temples, or by swallowing potions of deadly poison, for pointless reasons: an argument, an arrow that had missed, a reprimand by one of their kin. The most trivial frustration could lead a Machiguenga to kill himself. It was as though their will to live, their instinct for survival, had been reduced to a minimum.
The slightest illness brought on death. They were terrified of head colds, as were many of the tribes of Amazonia — sneezing in front of them always meant frightening them — but, and in this they differed from the other tribes, they refused to take care of themselves once they fell ill. At the least headache, bleeding, or accident, they prepared themselves for death. They would not take medicine or let themselves be looked after. “What’s the use, if we must go in one way or another?” they would say. Their witch doctors or medicine men — the seripigaris — were consulted and called upon to exorcize bad spirits and evils of the soul; but as soon as these manifested themselves as bodily ills, they regarded them as more or less incurable. A sick person making his way to the riverbank to lie down and await death was a frequent sight.
Their wariness and mistrust of strangers were extreme, as were their fatalism and timidity. The sufferings the community had endured during the rubber boom, when they were hunted by the “suppliers” of the camps or by Indians of other tribes who could thereby pay their debts to the bosses, had left a mark of terror in their myths and legends of that period, which they referred to as the tree-bleeding. Perhaps it was true, as a Dominican missionary, Father José Pío Aza — the first to study their language — maintained, that they were the last vestiges of a Pan-Amazonian civilization (attested, so he claimed, by the mysterious petroglyphs scattered throughout the Alto Urubamba) which had suffered defeat after defeat since its encounters with the Incas and was gradually dying out.